Final Projects

Your final must be a physically interactive system that keeps the user engaged. There should be a clear input and output (unless lack of clarity is the point, in which case there should be good reason for it) and create an ongoing "conversation," as opposed to a "one-liner" project that does one thing without variation. The strongest interactions typically result in responses that are prompt and clearly mapped to the inputs.

Your project should be more polished than a typical homework assignment and demonstrate your understanding of the underlying technology, but more importantly it should be functional and demonstrate a thoughtful and deliberately designed interaction. I care more about how compelling the interaction is than how pretty or technically advanced the project is.

The following questions may help you in coming up with an idea/design for your final and evaluating the quality of your interaction.

• Do the inputs and outputs make sense for each other?
• Is the mapping between inputs and outputs appropriate? Meaningful? Clear?
• How much freedom/variation is there in the overall experience? Is there depth to the conversation or is it a one-liner?

Technology

You are not required to use Arduino - feel free to experiment with other platforms, development boards, software, etc. If you are considering using something not covered in class, speak with me and I can point you to resources and try to help you get started.

Materials

Please shop around and see what's available out there. There's a huge variety of sensors and actuators out there and there is usually something better suited for your specific idea than what came in your kit (eg. Monica's moisture sensor for her serial project). The components in your kit are the most generic versions of each component and it takes away from a project when you use the stock versions of everything. I'm not requiring you to spend money but I would highly encourage you to look for parts that best serve your needs instead of limiting your ideas based on what you have in your kit.

Quality

You are welcome to be creative with materials but these projects should be more polished than your previous homework assignments (eg. no cardboard and tape prototypes). If you're making a physical controller, make a physical controller. Don't just stick a bunch of buttons on a breadboard and leave your circuits exposed. This is acceptable for homework assignments but your final product should take it one step further.

Reality Check

Don't expect this to be your magnum opus. You're just scratching the surface of physical computing in a one semester class, so while I'd like you to have a polished finished product, I also understand that it is still a prototype and many of you won't come close to the vision you started out with. Here are some tips to turn your ideas into a reality.

1. Start with the raw idea
   • What would you make if you could make any physical computing project? If you weren't limited by time/knowledge/resources/etc.?
2. Pare it down
   • What's the simplest version of this that you could achieve given your time/technical/material constraints?
3. Build and adjust
   • Build with the pared down version as your initial goal. As you make progress, you'll have a better idea of what's working and what isn't, what you'll have to change or take out, what you can add back in from your original idea, etc. Or your project may go in a completely different direction as you go along, which is totally fine!